“The waves! not that; look again. You see a thin ripple. There’s a cord making it. Yonder’s the float! and close behind that you will see something more. There, there he is!”
Sure enough, there was a rippling line caused by a cord drawn rapidly along the surface; at the end of this a small buoy of wood dragged rapidly after, and close behind a canoe, with an Indian in it, the Indian in a bent attitude, plying his paddle, and evidently in pursuit of the wounded cow-fish. The log was a “float,” the line drawing it along was at its other end attached to a harpoon, and that harpoon had its barbs buried in the body of the peixe-boi!
Such a specimen of a human being, even for a savage, none of the spectators—the tapuyo perhaps excepted—had ever beheld. He was as naked as if he had never been outside the Garden of Eden; and this very nakedness displayed a form that, but for the absence of a hairy covering, more resembled that of a monkey than a man. A body extremely attenuated, yet pot-bellied, too; a pair of long, thin arms, with legs to match, the latter knotted at the knees, the former balled at the elbows; a huge head, seemingly larger from its mop of matted hair; a face with high cheeks and sunken eyes,—gave him an appearance more demoniac than human. No wonder that little Rosa screamed as he came in sight, and that dismay exhibited itself on the features of several others of the party.
“Hush!” whispered Munday. “Silence all! Not a word, or we shall be seen, and then not he, but perhaps a hundred of his tribe—Hush!”
Fortunately the scream of Rosita had been only slight; and the savage, in eager pursuit of the peixe-boi, had not heard it, for he continued the chase without pause.
He had no difficulty in discovering the whereabouts of his game. The float guided him; for, no matter where the cow went, the tether was still attached to her, and the movement of the log along the surface betrayed to the eye of her pursuer every change of direction.
Two or three times, the savage, dropping his paddle, was enabled to lay hold of the line and commence hauling in; but the great strength of the juarouá, as yet unexhausted, proved too much for him, and he was compelled to let go or be pulled out of his craft.
The latter was but a frail concern, of the smallest and rudest kind,—consisting of a shell of bark, gathered up at both ends and tied by sipos, so as to give it somewhat the shape of an ordinary canoe. Even when paddling with all his strength, its owner could make no great speed; but great speed was not required in the chase of a peixe-boi with a barbed spear sticking through its skin and rankling between its ribs. It only required patience, until the huge creature should become exhausted with its struggles and enfeebled by the loss of blood. Then might the conquest be completed without either difficulty or danger.
For twenty minutes or more the chase continued; the float being dragged hither and thither, until it had crossed the water in almost every direction. Sometimes both log and canoe were in sight, sometimes only one of them, and sometimes neither,—at such times the cow-fish having passed far beyond the limits of clear water visible to the spectators.
On the last of these occasions, several minutes had elapsed before the chase came again in sight. Our adventurers were in hopes they would see no more of either fish, float, or follower. The interest they might otherwise have taken in such a curious spectacle was destroyed by the thought of the danger that would result in their being discovered.